Have Americans really fallen out of love with driving?

The American consumer has come a long way since the depths of the Great Recession.

The unemployment rate has fallen from a high of 10.1% to 6.2% today, while many Americans have used the recession and recovery as an opportunity to pay down (or walk away from) household debt. And as you can see from the chart below, consumer spending has continued to rise at a steady pace except for a small blip during the worst of the recession:

Of course, it’s not surprising that consumer spending has continued to rise. With a growing population, economy, and even moderate inflation, it’s expected that American consumers will spend more tomorrow than they do today. Most economic metrics, for these reasons, tend to grow over time. That’s why it’s so surprising that one statistic—miles driven—has been stagnant for almost seven years:

The only other time in history that we’ve seen a similarly long time between the peak and trough was following the 1982 recession, in which it took 39 months for total vehicle miles traveled to recover to its previous peak. It’s now been more than twice that amount of time since we reached the all-time high in vehicle miles driven, and unlike the case in the 1980s, we don’t have the excuse of a recent gas-tax hike to blame for it.

So, what is going on here? In a note to clients Thursday, independent research firm Behind the Numbers argued that we’re entering a new era in which Americans simply prefer to drive less. They write:

It’s unlikely that miles driven is a lagging indicator that will eventually return to its prior trend. There is ample evidence that a 60-year trend of increased per capita driving has ended…. Among the reasons a sharp reversal is unlikely:

Boomers are getting older and driving less.

Millennials are less interested in driving, and are now the largest generation in the US.

The trend toward living near the urban core reduces the need for driving.

Higher gas prices discourage driving.

Mass transportation is winning over more consumers.

As a result, Behind the Numbers asks whether we should be skeptical of the future success of companies like Goodyear Tire GT, as its sales are directly related to American driving. And lo, Goodyear’s tire sales have performed poorly:

BTN wonders whether we should be worried about other companies too, like the big auto makers, or even retailers, as Americans gravitate towards driving less and sticking with public transportation. But it’s also a good idea to ask whether this trend towards driving less is as permanent as some commentators think.

While it’s true that Baby Boomers are aging and will continue to drive less throughout their lives, the argument that there have been significant changes to the economy and culture that will cause Millennials to drive less warrants a bit of examination. First off, the claim that gas prices are higher now than they’ve been in the past is just not true. Here’s a chart from economist Ed Dolan, which shows that fuel prices per hour worked is far lower than in the mid-1990s, when miles driven figures were still on an upward trajectory:

Second of all, the trend of Americans moving to the “urban core” seems to be slowing. While it’s true that urban areas have been growing faster than the suburbs over the last decade or so, it looks as if that trend may be starting to reverse its course. Big cities like New Yorkand San Francisco, which have the sort of public transportation networks that enable people to go without a car, are running into fierce opposition against further development. And in some of the faster growing cities in America, like Dallasor Seattle, living without a car is still a hassle. It’s possible that the political obstacles to denser living in America will be overcome, but it’s no sure thing.

Finally, while Millennials are now America’s largest demographic group, we have yet to really feel their presence in the economy. The single most common age in America today is 23, an age where it’s much easier to get by living in a city without a car. As Millennials start to settle down, get married, and have children, it’s quite possible that their relative aversion to suburban life and cars will soften a bit.

There’s plenty of reason to believe that America’s love affair with the car is beginning to cool, but it’s probably a bit early to declare this case closed.

The community builders of the New Metropolis

Tony Hsieh and Scott Heiferman were talking about cities and community long before it became hip to do so. As CEO of Zappos, Hsieh built a culture that encouraged people to “collide” with each other, and after deciding it would be easier for them to do that in an urban location than in a suburban office park, he redeveloped downtown Las Vegas and moved Zappos’ headquarters there last year. As co-founder and CEO of Meetup, Heiferman built a platform that uses the power of the Internet to let people with common interests organize and meet face-to-face, to the tune of some 16 million members and 140,000 different Meetup groups. The two have known each other for years, but ever since Hsieh became an investor in Meetup, they have been collaborating and colliding a little bit more closely. Fortune’s Leigh Gallagher sat down with them to talk about cities, community, and how tech can enable both.

Tony, why the focus on city-making?

Hsieh: I didn’t really know or care about anything related to urban planning. But 10, 15 years ago, I used to throw a lot of parties. And I’d notice that there were multiple bars, and the first bar would reach this congestion point, and then another bar would open to promote the circulation and more collisions and so on. And then at Zappos, we designed the office [the former Las Vegas City Hall] so that employees collide with each other more often. For example, even at our new office right now, there’s a parking garage connected to the skybridge, connected to the office building. And when the city employees used to work there, they would park and walk across the skybridge to the office. And we actually made the decision to shut down the skybridge, which forces employees out on the street and creates more collision opportunities with the community and each other. And now on the city level, it’s the exact same concept, just on a different scale. So to me, it’s like trying to throw one big continuous party.

And what’s your take on why more people are choosing to live in cities?

Hsieh: I looked a lot at the science of happiness research for my book [Delivering Happiness], and [one big theme is that] people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. I think for the longest time when people were moving out to the suburbs, they bought a bigger house thinking they would be happier, and what they unwittingly ended up trading was hours. It’s two hours of commute time, maybe more, for that bigger house, and that’s time they could have been building social connections with friends or being relaxed. And the research has shown that one of the biggest predictors of happiness is basically peoples’ commute time [relative to] their personal time. The science of happiness research also shows that happiness comes from connectedness, meaning the number and depth of your relationships, and I think those things are generally what we can sort of find in a city much more than isolated in the suburbs, where you may not even know your neighbors.

But one thing you need in a great city, something that is the cheapest thing to do, but also the hardest, is to have a culture of openness and collaboration and sharing. If people are twice as likely to engage with each other, then maybe you don’t need residential density; and if you live in a city or place where no one talks to each other, then the density doesn’t matter. So really, the question is, What’s the culture of the community or the city? And that’s something that we’ve been very mindful of in terms of the types of communities that we invest in. In downtown Vegas, whether it’s small businesses or tech companies or fashion companies, we want the entrepreneurs to have a bias to help other people in businesses in the community.

How important is it to encourage diversity?

Hsieh: We’re in a slightly different situation in that most of the properties we’ve acquired are empty lots, so it’s not quite the same challenge that other cities have. But ultimately you want people of diverse socioeconomic statuses. And you want to ensure that not only can everyone live there, but that they’ll ultimately somehow interact with each other.

Heiferman:I think the answer is thrusting people together. You need these catalysts for the collisions. And as we go deeper into a world where our earbuds are in and the phone is in front of our face, you can live in a bubble where you’re only exposed to your world of friends, or as Eli Pariser calls it, a filter bubble. And the ability to become exposed to people who are not your friends and who are different from you gets harder and harder. But I actually think that there’s a counter-trend on the Internet in the way that the Airbnbs and Ubers and Lifts and Meetups and others are sparking these collisions. It may be over-simplistic, but I think ultimately when people talk to each other, they get on better. I also think that there’s going to be a reclaiming of space in new ways. Starbucks talks about being the third place, but I guarantee if you go to Starbucks, everyone’s just going to be staring at their screen. They’re not going to be talking to each other.

Tony, what has most surprised you most now that you’re a few years into developing downtown Las Vegas?

Hsieh: What’s been surprising is the stuff that actually gets people excited about our community is not that expensive. It’s basically just finding someone that’s passionate about something. It’s exactly what makes Meetup work. Someone is passionate about something, and then they find a few people who want to support it, and then it grows organically over time, and it becomes this big thing, whether it’s trivia night or people who are into 3-D printing or whatever weird or interesting thing is out there.

And what has been your biggest lesson during that time?

Hsieh: I think the biggest lesson for us is being more careful with the word “community” in an urban redevelopment or neighborhood context. When you’re referring to a physical space, for the people there it can imply different things. For example, if we wanted to open up a skating park but there was someone there already that was passionate about skating parks, suddenly that’s being anti-community because you’re not allowing the person that had the idea 10 years ago to [do it,] even though that may not be the best executor of it. Or people misinterpret you as taking on the role of government. [And then it becomes,] Why aren’t you also addressing every issue under the sun? Why aren’t you providing free education and solving this problem and doing X, Y, and Z?

Scott, what does community mean to you?

Heiferman: Well, the definition of community for me is people talking. And if they keep talking for a while, they stay a community. If they don’t, then it’s not a community. You can’t call a piece of land a community. A community is a living thing. It’s made of people, and it’s living, and it’s breathing, and it dies.

And what if anything does Meetup take from principles of urbanism?

Heiferman: It’s funny–in urbanism you talk about density and physical metrics, like collisions per square foot or mile. In growing Meetup, we think about the density of how many people interested in Double Dutch do you have to have per square mile for there to be a Meetup? And ultimately what does that mean for what makes a great city?

And what does it mean?

Heiferman: I’ll tell you what, actually. Mayor Bloomberg wrote a piece last year about how to make New York a “world-class tech community.” He said, “You need capital. You need good education. You need this, you need this, you need this.” But what’s the one thing he didn’t mention about how to build a great technology community? He said everything except, “It needs to be a community.”

When I started the New York Tech Meetup 10 years ago there was this vague notion of a tech community in New York, but there really wasn’t a community. And then Tech Meetup took off and grew and grew and grew. But it’s not the New York Tech Meetup that’s interesting. It is the fact that there are now 1,000 Tech Meetups in New York City. But what does that really look like and feel like? [Heiferman turns to his laptop and starts scrolling through New York tech Meetups.] Tell me when to stop scrolling.

Okay, stop. [Stops at groups that have 700 members.]

Heiferman: Ok, so certainly you’ve got the New York Sports Tech Meetup and the New York City Mobile Experience Meetup and the Health Developers and the Python Programming Ladies and the Big Data Meetup. Now it gets really interesting when you keep going and get to the ones with 300 members. You get the SEO Meetup and Wearable Computing Meetup and the Innovation in Education Meetup and the 3-D Printing Meetup, and the Huff Post Code Meetup. This is how you develop an economy. This is what made the New York tech industry take off. There is the ability for collisions, for people to collaborate, there is all the funding that has happened in these Meetups, all the hiring that has happened in these Meetups, all the founders that found their co-founders at the Meetups. These are the stories we swim in. And it’s so technocratic to think [affects stern, officious tone], “It’s about the capital and the education and the this and the that.” No, actually, you know what? A fucking city is fucking people meeting up.

As Jane Jacobs might have herself said.

Totally. And actually that’s exactly how old school Silicon Valley worked. Steve Wozniak is on record saying if it weren’t for the Homebrew Computer Club, then Apple wouldn’t have existed.

A shorter version of this interview originally appeared in the June 30, 2014 issue of Fortune.

The New Metropolis

“I’m going to close my eyes, and when I open them I want to see skyscrapers.”

That’s Don Draper speaking in Season five of Mad Men, after he reluctantly traipses to Cos Cob, Conn. with Betty for a dinner party at Pete Campbell’s. But it might as well be almost any CEO speaking today. From tech startups to telecom networkers to infrastructure providers to retailers to homebuilders to big industrial giants, corporate entities of all kinds are touting their renewed focus on, and in some cases move to, urban locations. That’s because we’re in the midst of one of the biggest demographic trends to hit our landscape: a global migration of wealth to cities. Here in the U.S., cities that were abandoned in the 1970s (FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, read the famous headline in the New YorkDaily News in 1975) are now shiny new beacons of wealth and gentrification. Families are raising young kids in cities, corporate giants are moving their headquarters to cities, and crime has fallen to new lows in many unlikely places. (WELCOME TO MAYBERRY, NYC, read the New York Post last year when new data came out showing crime hit record lows.) Pull the camera back, and the trend is even bigger as the global urban population will nearly double by 2050.

I wrote a book about this shift that came out last year (shameless author plug:The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving). In the time since, I have traveled the country visiting cities and suburbs far and wide. The trend is alive and well everywhere, from the chic urbanizing downtown of our cities (even Cleveland has three different “Brooklyn-esque” neighborhoods) to suburbs that are themselves urbanizing. The desire for proximity, for access to a downtown, to people, to that cliché good cup of coffee, to life–and perhaps above all, to not have to embark on expensive, draining commutes each day–is palpable. And it’s only getting stronger, especially among the millennials that represent the next generation of homebuyers (or renters).

We here at Fortune have a rich history covering urbanism. There was the work of William “Holly” Whyte, who wrote about the sociology of the workplace in the 1950s and who was among the first to document urban sprawl in our pages before going on to influence the shaping of public spaces in cities. And Jane Jacobs’ legendary book The Death and Life of Great American Cities began with an article Jacobs wrote for Fortune in 1958, “Downtown is for People.”

And so it is that we now bring you Fortune’s first New Metropolis, which digs deep into this shift. In this special package, we cover a lot of ground: We examine the changes urbanization, among other things, has wrought on Americans’ appetite for driving. We take you on the ground in Lagos, Nigeria, where exploding growth and innovative policies are forging a model for Africa’s urban future, and to Orlando, where an innovative residential and medical complex is rising amid Florida’s sprawl. We bring you a chat with Tony Hsieh and Scott Heiferman, two tech stars who have led on the issue of urbanism and community. And we take a close look at the smartest cities on the planet and the people who are making them that way.

It’s a lot of material, but it’s a trend that, judging solely from the number of companies and other entities reaching out to us to tout their interests, investments, and involvement in cities, shows no sign of slowing. For more coverage of the intersection of urbanism and business ongoing basis, visit The Urbanist on Fortune.com. In the meantime there’s much to explore right here in the stories that follow. Because as Draper knew in 1960s-era Mad Men and as corporate America knows now, cities are where all the action is.

A shorter version of this story appeared in the June 30, 2014 issue of Fortune.